Green is the color of nature, luck, life, and fresh starts.

But it's also the color of poison, decay, jealousy, sickness, toxic sludge, unlucky race cars, suspicious theater costumes, and one beautifully-deadly pigment some people decided to put absolutely everywhere.

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela embark on a new technicolor cursed journey with Cursed Colors: Green, exploring why green has been treated as eerie, unlucky, dangerous, and maybe just a little bit cursed throughout history.

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s green-eyed monster, fae folklore, and theater superstitions to Carl Wilhelm Scheele’s vivid arsenic-based pigment, we follow green from myth and symbolism into the very real poison hiding in Victorian wallpaper, artificial flowers, clothing, books, cosmetics, toys, and more.

Along the way, we talk Scheele’s Green, poisoned wallpaper, Matilda Scheuer, William Morris, Queen Victoria, the Poison Book Project, Oscar Wilde’s green carnation, and why humans keep looking at beautiful dangerous things and asking, “Can we put this everywhere?”

Maybe green is life. Maybe green is death. Maybe green is mold, magic, jealousy, and wallpaper that can quietly gas you in your own home. Maybe cursed. Maybe not.

https://hyperallergic.com/death-by-wallpaper-alluring-arsenic-colors-poisoned-the-victorian-age/

https://www.slam.org/blog/arsenic-in-victorian-wallpaper/

https://www.jalopnik.com/how-the-color-green-became-a-deadly-bad-luck-superstiti-1763008917/

https://vaulteditions.com/blogs/news/poisoned-pages-the-lethal-legacy-of-19th-century-book-design

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3179678/

https://britishfairies.wordpress.com/2021/05/30/poor-little-greenie-faeries-and-little-green-men/

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Is it the Berenstein Bears or the Berenstain Bears? Did the Monopoly Man have a monocle? Was there ever a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo?

And, most importantly, has reality always been this wrong?

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel take a hard left into the strange, brain-breaking world of the Mandela Effect, the phenomenon where large groups of people collectively remember something that apparently never happened. From Jif versus Jiffy, Looney Tunes, Curious George’s missing tail, Febreze, Skechers, Pikachu, and the infamous Fruit of the Loom cornucopia, we dig into the pop culture memories that make people wonder whether they misremembered, swapped timelines, or accidentally got patched into the wrong universe.

Along the way, we talk about paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, the origin of the term Mandela Effect, false memories, confabulation, shared childhood culture, Reddit rabbit holes, the Large Hadron Collider, CERN conspiracy theories, and why the human brain is so confident even when it is absolutely making things up.

Is the Mandela Effect proof of alternate realities, time travel, parallel timelines, or experiments with the fabric of reality? Or are we all just walking around with deeply unreliable brains and a shocking amount of confidence?

Maybe it is science. Maybe it is memory. Maybe it is CERN. Maybe we were all just cursed into oblivion by a missing underwear cornucopia.

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Link to Cursed Painting - Open with Caution - https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSAq5NbAyoMu1Rb8ohN-tb2d5WriWF_EOruRTMKj9QxxQ&s=10

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela investigate The Hands Resist Him, the allegedly cursed painting by artist Bill Stoneham that became one of the internet’s earliest viral cursed-object legends. The painting itself is unsettling enough: a young boy, a life-size doll girl with black eyes, disembodied hands pressed against a glass door, and the general feeling that maybe you should not be looking at it too long after dark.

But the real legend begins when the painting appeared in an early eBay listing with claims that the figures moved at night, the boy left the frame, and the artwork had to be removed from the seller’s home. From there, the story spiraled into reports of dizziness, fainting, printer malfunctions, supernatural panic, and the kind of internet folklore that feels very familiar to anyone who remembers the wild, lawless energy of the early 2000s internet.

Along the way, we talk cursed paintings, creepy art, the Dybbuk Box, haunted eBay listings, Bill Stoneham’s sequels to The Hands Resist Him, whether art can become cursed through collective belief, and why a painting does not need to be supernatural to make people feel deeply, deeply weird.

Is The Hands Resist Him actually cursed, or did the internet just take a compelling, unsettling piece of art and build a legend around it?

Maybe there is no ghost crawling out of the frame. Maybe the real curse is what happens when the internet decides your artwork belongs to the haunted corners of history forever.

https://stonehamstudios.com/haunted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hands_Resist_Him

https://www.bbc.co.uk/derby/unexplained/2002/haunted_painting/ebay_haunted_painting_01.shtml

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Some cursed objects come with centuries of documentation, terrified witnesses, and a long trail of bodies.

The Basano Vase mostly comes with vibes.

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel investigate the legend of the Basano Vase, an allegedly cursed silver vase said to have been made in 15th-century Italy as a wedding gift. According to the story, the bride died on her wedding night while clutching the vase, and from there the object supposedly passed from owner to owner, leaving mysterious deaths behind it until someone finally had the good sense to bury the thing.

But when the vase allegedly resurfaced in 1988, things got even stranger, and also much, much sketchier. A pharmacist, a surgeon, an archaeologist, a police officer, a secret burial, an auction, a littering fine, and absolutely not enough names, records, or details for Angela’s liking.

So is the Basano Vase one of the world’s most dangerous cursed objects, or is it a modern urban legend that desperately needed a better writer?

Along the way, we talk cursed objects, internet folklore, the Dybbuk Box, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, 90s kid urban legends, roller coaster rumors, cannibal make-out stories, and why some fake stories feel more believable than allegedly true ones.

Maybe the Basano Vase is cursed. Maybe it is not. But if this is modern mythology, we are simply asking everyone involved to step up the storytelling.

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

The full moon is rising again, Accursed Ones.

In Part 2 of Cursed Creatures: Werewolves, Daniel and Angela return to the woods to finish unpacking one of the most enduring monsters in folklore, mythology, horror movies, and our collective fear of what might be lurking under the skin.

This time, we follow the werewolf legend beyond ancient myth and medieval trials into the Beast of Gévaudan, the rougarou of Louisiana folklore, Irish wolf-warriors, Argentina’s lobizón, Romanian vampire-werewolf hybrids, and other strange shapeshifter traditions from around the world. Along the way, we ask how a creature once tied to divine punishment, mob hysteria, and moral panic became the full-moon monster we know today.

Spoiler Alert: a lot of it comes from Hollywood just making stuff up until we all decided it was ancient lore. Silver bullets, full moons, tragic transformations, cursed bites, and the tortured wolfman all owe more to movies like The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man than most of us probably realized. Apparently, our deepest monster mythology was heavily shaped by sequel logic. Naturally.

We also dig into possible real-world explanations for werewolf stories, including rabies, clinical lycanthropy, ergot poisoning, and the very human need to explain horrifying behavior by turning people into monsters.

Are werewolves cursed creatures, misunderstood victims, sexy supernatural love interests, or just one of humanity’s oldest ways of asking what separates man from beast?

Maybe the real curse is not that a person could become a wolf. Maybe the real curse is that we invented the wolf to explain what people were already capable of doing.

https://www.shetlandmuseumandarchives.org.uk/blog/the-real-story-behind-the-shetland-wulver

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/29/argentina-kirchner-adopt-child-werewolf

https://paulsullivan216.substack.com/p/howling-at-the-moon-a-complete-history

https://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/the-rage-of-the-wolf-metamorphosis-and-identity-in-medieval-werewolf-tales/

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

In Part 1 of our Cursed Creatures deep dive, Cursed...ish heads into the woods under a full moon to ask a deceptively simple question: where did werewolf legends actually come from?

Before silver bullets, full moons, and shirtless men chaining themselves to basement pipes, werewolves were already prowling through ancient mythology, folklore, and some deeply cursed corners of human history. Daniel and Angela trace lycanthropy back to the Old English roots of “werewolf,” the Greek origins of “lycanthrope,” and one of the earliest Western werewolf stories: King Lycaon, the mythological ruler cursed by Zeus to become a wolf after committing a dinner-party crime so horrifying it should have voided his hosting privileges forever.

From there, we follow the wolf trail through the Epic of Gilgamesh, Norse wolf-warriors, medieval fear, and the terrifying reality of European werewolf trials. Along the way, we meet Peter Stumpp, the infamous Werewolf of Bedburg, whose story may be part murder trial, part scapegoat panic, and part tabloid nightmare. We also meet Old Thiess, the self-proclaimed “hound of God” who insisted the court had werewolves all wrong.

So are werewolves cursed monsters, misunderstood victims, or just another story humans invented to explain the darkness in ourselves?

Maybe cursed. Maybe not. Definitely hairy.

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Why can no Hogwarts professor survive more than one year teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts?

In this very unofficial Harry Potter episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela return to Hogwarts to investigate one of the wizarding world’s most suspicious job openings: the cursed Defense Against the Dark Arts position. Across seven books, Hogwarts burns through professor after professor, from Quirrell and his deeply inadvisable Voldemort head-share to Gilderoy Lockhart’s fraudulent little memory-wiping empire, Remus Lupin’s tragic exit, Fake Mad-Eye Moody’s disturbingly committed lesson planning, Dolores Umbridge’s pink-cardigan fascism, Severus Snape finally getting the job he absolutely should have known better than to want, and the full Dark Arts nightmare of Voldemort’s Hogwarts.

Along the way, we talk Dumbledore’s questionable hiring practices, Barty Crouch Jr.’s bizarre commitment to education, whether anyone at Hogwarts understood red flags, and why this revolving door of cursed professors became one of the most effective recurring patterns in the Harry Potter series.

Was the Defense Against the Dark Arts job cursed because Voldemort hexed it after Dumbledore rejected him? Was it cursed because Hogwarts HR was apparently run by owls and vibes? Or was the real curse simply letting children attend a school where every year’s teacher came with a new trauma package?

Maybe cursed. Maybe not. But this time, honestly, pretty cursed.

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

What happens when a cursed ghost ship becomes both victim and warning?

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela set sail into the foggy, storm-tossed legend of the Flying Dutchman, the doomed ship said to be cursed to sail the oceans forever, never reaching port and never finding peace. From eerie sightings by British sailors and royal witnesses to centuries of maritime folklore around the Cape of Good Hope, this episode explores why the Flying Dutchman became one of the most famous ghost ship legends in the world.

Along the way, we dig into Dutch sea power, the dangerous trade routes of the Dutch East India Company, Captain Hendrik van der Decken, cursed letters from the dead, and the strange idea that simply seeing the Flying Dutchman could bring disaster. Then we look beneath the surface at possible real-world explanations, including St. Elmo’s fire, Fata Morgana mirages, stormy seas, sailor superstition, and the very human need to turn fear, loss, and uncertainty into a story.

Was the Flying Dutchman a cursed ship doomed by hubris, a ghostly omen of death, or just a terrifying trick of light on the open ocean?

Maybe cursed. Maybe not.

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.